Tuesday, June 6, 2017

SEMI reports record Q1/2017 spending for Semiconductor Equipment in Korea, Japan and China

Today SEMI reported that worldwide semiconductor manufacturing equipment billings reached US$13.1 billion for the first quarter of 2017. That is a very strong quarter with the month of March reaching an all time monthly record at $5.6 billion. Not since 2000 the quarterly billing has been this high. Most interestingly, South Korea has replaced Taiwan as the largest semiconductor equipment market.

Three markets are showing exceptional growth and that is South Korea (Samsung & SK Hynix), China and Japan (Toshiba & Micron), which must be related to investments in 3D-NAND and DRAM Fab equipment. This is in line with the statement made by VLSI Research at the recent CMC2017 conference in Dallas, saying that they are updating their equipment forecast for 2017 based on increased spending in Memory and especially DRAM this year.

For memory ALD process has been a crucial tool in HVM since 2004 when Samsung started production of 90 nm DRAM with an ALD HfO2/Al2O3 dual stack and since then many, many more ALD process passes has been added to both DRAM and 3D-NAND, for instance in multiple patterning and Tungsten ALD for 3D-NAND gates and Al2O3 blocking oxide in those deep trenches. That is why we can assume that the ALD OEMs should all show record revenue for their ALD business units in 2017. Obviously also PECVD and Etch will benefit from this spending.